Giving credit for audacity can be an awkward business. Performance artist Bryony Kimmings, after creating a fictional pop star in her Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model, has now embarked on a full-scale musical for the inaugural production of arm’s-length umbrella body (?) Complicité Associates. As subject matter for musicals goes, a day in the life of a cancer ward is pretty audacious, the more so when the stated intention is to break down the taboos around the subject.

As Emma (Amanda Hadingue) visits the hospital with her baby son for oncological tests, she encounters a clutch of other patients: the woman in denial, the young man unable to shake off his well-intentioned but controlling mother, the guilty curmudgeon and so on. We see issues both individual and common to all, in songs written with Tom Parkinson which include a power ballad or two but tend more towards the aggressively funky. This is one respect in which the audacity doesn’t work: a loud, confrontational number asserting the patients’ vulnerability isn’t an interesting paradox so much as a self-invalidation. Similarly, the smoker’s spoken self-defence is conducted in strangely economic terms: he’s paid his taxes, runs his argument, therefore he’s entitled to waste his treatment money by lighting up. Again, the lack of discussion of his actual motivation seems less a deliberate, articulate absence than a big hole.

For the most part, it all works tolerably well... until the final sequence. First the actors lip-sync to the voices of the real-life cancer patients on whom their characters are based. Then, Kimmings (present in this show only in voiceover) reveals that Hadingue’s character is based on her experiences with her own son. One of the actual patients comes onstage to read out a list of her hopes. The cast are invited to namecheck any folk they may have in mind, then the audience likewise. This may be intended as inclusivity, but it feels to me like a comprehensive operation in invalidating any criticism: you either become complicit (ha), or are disqualified. I can’t recall when last I felt so despicably manipulated, so flagrantly emotionally blackmailed, by a stage piece. When I left, I too was smoking, out of my ears.

Written for the Financial Times.